Huntington, SpeakEasy plays intersect on race and real estate

Two significant, award-winning plays about race relations - written some 50 years apart, with one character in common - are running concurrently in Boston. They give audiences a chance to consider two very different perspectives on topics our country has a difficult time discussing - race and class.

Two significant, award-winning plays about race relations - written some 50 years apart, with one character in common - are running concurrently in Boston. They give audiences a chance to consider two very different perspectives on topics our country has a difficult time discussing - race and class.

Lorraine Hansberry’s "A Raisin in the Sun," which debuted on Broadway in 1959, is being produced by the Huntington Theatre Company. It’s only the second time in their history that they’ve tackled a play twice. This classic play features the Youngers, a black family who live in a crowded Chicago South-Side apartment while trying to make ends meet. They hope for a better life yet have conflicting ideas about how a $10,000 life insurance check should be used to improve their prospects. The play’s title is taken from lines of Langston Hughes’ poem "A Dream Deferred - "What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up/like a raisin in the sun?/... Or does it explode?"

Across town, SpeakEasy Stage Company has mounted a production of "Clybourne Park" written in 2010 by Bruce Norris, a playwright who seems devoted to skewering the self-satisfaction of white liberal audiences. The title is the name of the fictional, all-white neighborhood where the Youngers in "Raisin" decide to move, much to the dismay of the residents.

The first act of Norris’ play is set in 1959 in the home the Youngers are buying as we watch the owners, Bev and Russ, prepare to sell it and move out. In the second act, set exactly 50 years later, Tom and Lindsey, another white couple, have bought the very same house - now part of an black community that’s being gentrified - and plan to raze it and build a larger one.

Linking the two plays is the character of Karl Lindner, a white, Clybourne Park property owner. In "Raisin," Lindner, played by Will McGarrahan, tries to persuade the Youngers not to move to Clybourne Park. And in the play "Clybourne Park," Lindner, portrayed by Michael Kaye, tries to persuade Bev and Russ not to sell their house to the Youngers.

The styles of the two plays are radically different. "There’s a tremendous amount of heart to the story Lorraine Hansberry is telling," said M. Bevin O’Gara, who directed "Clybourne" as a freelance director and helped cast "Raisin" as part of her day job as associate producer for the Huntington. "Not that there isn’t a heart to moments of "Clybourne. But overall, there’s a tremendous sense of irony as to how writers today (including Norris) deal with these issues and situations."

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Liesl Tommy turned down five invitations to direct "Raisin" before accepting Huntington’s offer, her first crack at directing the play. "I knew it would be extremely challenging," said Tommy, who was born in South Africa. She agreed to direct it for the Huntington because she felt they would provide the support she, her designers and cast would need.

Tommy’s earliest memories are of living in a black township in Cape Town, South Africa, where her family’s home was so cramped her parents had one room, she and her grandmother shared another and her father’s siblings and their spouses lived in other rooms and passages. She drew on these memories while creating the Younger’s crowded apartment in "Raisin."

As she worked at making her production of "Raisin" feel fresh and relevant to today, she talked with her cast about the light the play sheds on today’s African-American male, whom she said society marginalizes and makes one-dimensional. "He’s ether a perfect creature or a lost person in jail. We see that in film and television daily, and we see it in theater."

Just before giving the interview, Tommy had helped Kimberly Scott go to the depths of a line in which her character, Lena, admits having treated her grown son, Walter Lee, in the same destructive way society has. "Sometimes it’s really painful for black actors to go to that place and imagine," Tommy said. "The job of a director is to make sure we’re going as deep as possible all the time. Acting is easy, what’s difficult is going there."

O’Gara, the director of "Clybourne Park," found her way into directing as a high school student. "I was a dork among theater dorks," she said. When she wasn’t selected as one of the students most likely to become a professional director, she was determined to prove her fellow students wrong. And did she ever.

O’Gara said that the first act of "Clybourne Park" is tragic with some comedy, while the second act is comic with some tragedy. In the second act, several characters, white and black, tell outrageous, racist jokes. "They’re not the kind of jokes you sit around and tell friends, at least most people don’t," she said. "My hope is that the humor washes over you and you go along with the ride, and only afterward you say, ‘I just laughed at that, whoa, and what does it mean that I laughed at that.’" She believes Norris is using humor to make us confront things about our selves we wouldn’t otherwise confront.

Norris is a self-proclaimed pessimist about racial progress, who’s determined to be provocative and prove that we haven’t really made much progress at all.

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O’Gara perhaps isn’t quite so much of a pessimist herself. "It’s a bit of a gross generalization to say nothing has changed," she said. "The façade has changed, and here is more work to do."

She’s reluctant to tell audiences what order they should see the plays in, but she did say, "You should experience both stories."